Making of Brittany Estates

I don't disagree with you, Kara Brae. But I think in terms of player housing, I believe the value of that housing has a very real impact on the long term retention of players in the game. What concerns me is that players will go through the land rush and there will be all these pockets of dead space that will be very beautiful but no one will have a reason to go there more than once or twice.

A year from now, are we really going to be walk through Brittany Estes talking about how beautiful it is? How much game time will that represent per person?

So now as a home owner you have this dead storage space where you keep your stuff but that's about it. No one sees your decorations, no one visits, there are no random encounters, and economically because there is no foot traffic your vendor is better off being put somewhere else. I see Brittany as a text book example of that, and as I project what I believe will happen very quickly to our world, I see a lot of these scenes being half traveled from quest point A to quest point B with very little player interaction. My feedback is just to get the developers thinking about this to see if there's a way to capture the beauty of the scene but also develop the social and economy hooks of the scene so that player housing is more than just a provided pledge reward.

 

That is the best shot of water I've seen in game. Even scenes that are listed as having the "new water plugin" generally don't look that good. Is that an even newer water plugin? Have you changed the water shader at all? Are you using one water plugin for the ocean, and another for lakes/rivers/ponds?

What will it take to fix the water in all the old scenes?

 

I feel the exact same way. I dread going into Owl's Head. The hodgepodge of player home styles, front yard deco, and vendor titles looks really tacky IMO. I just hope other beautiful scenes such as Brittany Estates don't end up going down the same route but maybe it's inevitable due to the lack of any housing/deco restrictions in NPC towns. I'm really glad I have my own town where I have a great deal of control over the central theme and overall look. I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else, but to each his own I guess.

The Highlands
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@ RrMatey -->WOW that is FANTASTIC, love all the gardens, stone work, water and open areas -- seems to have plenty of room to breath, relax and enjoy very well done -- CONGRATS.

Side note - To put my 2cents in about the placement of things -- I personally would rather have easy to find central market places than see everyone's clutter elsewhere in cities. In my opinion, Owls Head is a very Sad place at the moment with all the clutter, I personally do not go there for just that reason.

 

Can I call dibs on a keep lot in here?

 

It's actually two different systems from Ocean vs River. The ocean has waves and has to be flat. The rivers are more hand made and use an animated shader to showcase the flow.

 

Thank you for sending in your feedback. I will keep this in mind.

 

Citizen Kane...nice!

 

Many games the towns are large hubs, but the fact is this game has over 300 POT's and likely 100+ NPC towns, it's just far far far (far FAR) more towns than it is anything else. There's no way to make all of them appealing. Of course that didn't stop everyone in UO from wanting a house, and wanting a bigger house, and wanting one in a town if possible.

 

I'm hoping we can design around some of this. I don't think it's a population problem, or a player expectation problem. I think it's a city planning problem.

It's like this, many years ago one of my first jobs was to bag groceries for a large super market chain. I'd have to push a cart full of stuffed bags from the inside of a curb to some house wife's mini-van. There were good routes I could take that led to the parking lot and there were bad routes. The major differences were things like "where the most car congestion was" and
whether there was a ramp that made it easy to get over the curb leading up to the store".

So one day I'm pushing this cart out to the parking lot for some guy and his family and he starts asking a lot of questions about how I like the job and was there anything about the design of the parking lot that I didn't like. I immediately brought up the fact that every time someone was parked in the south end of the lot I had to battle traffic and there wasn't a ramp to get over the curb and that would often lead to a lot of almost spills of the cart. I then said something like "I'd love to talk to the guy that built this horrible parking lot because it's a mess and you'd think someone would've thought about putting more ramps on the curbs because all we do is push carts on them."

Of course, he was the guy that designed the parking lot and after a lot of laughter he agreed that "someone" should've been smarter than that. I quit that job a few months later, but by the end of that year "someone" had gone back and put in more ramps, rerouted the flow of traffic and added some speed bumps to slow down the rest.

The point of all this is simple. If we have a good idea about how players are going to use non-combat scenes with player housing, we can adjust our design to better meet those needs. But if we ignore how players use that housing, then we're going to have a lot of players that just ignore those areas because there's no reason to go to some random guys home in the middle of nowhere.

I think Resolute is an awesome example of a town that has player housing but is also designed for commerce. Right when you walk in, just about everything you want is right there. The only problem is that there's no player housing there. So all the "foot traffic" is going to skip almost all of the player vendors. Which makes it a GREAT place to visit but a horrible place to LIVE, if you're a merchant.

If I were designing these towns, what I'd try to do is think about how the town would sustain itself economically and how it would compete with other towns of the same size. Getting it to look beautiful is very important, but I don't think it's more important than making it have purpose.

Owl's Head, as much as I cringe with some of the player housing, especially when you first enter the scene, it serves a meaningful purpose. When you travel into Owl's Head you pretty much have to follow that long road into the center of town, which is still the most developed part of our game.

And so even though I rarely stop at the player vendors, I do occasionally stop and peek at what's for sale. I really can't say that about any other town in the game, and that's a problem. I don't want all towns to be or look like Owl's Head by any means, but I definitely believe that I want them all to function like Owl's Head. Because Owl's Head, even with this very small population continues to show life that no other town currently does. I think that's entirely because of the design.

 

I love the story about the parking lot .

I disagree with your arguments about player housing and Owl's Head. In my opinion, Owl's Head has a lot of action because it is the town people are most familiar with. PVPers tend to congregate there because they have come to expect to meet others there. The main reason why people I have spoken to go to Owl's Head is because the Blacksmith there pays the best prices for loot. If you want to earn gold fast, you have to go to the Hidden Vale, loot skeletons and sell the loot in Owl's Head. The only reason I ever go to Owl's Head is to sell stuff at the Blacksmith there. I hate the design of Owl's Head because I have to run past all the player vendors to get to the upper market where the bank and the blacksmith is. In earlier releases we could type /stuck and immediately teleport to the exit so we didn't have to run through the town both ways, but sadly this is no longer possible.

I traveled from one end of Novia to the other to buy a pet in a POT because the vendor was recommended to me by a guildmate. In Resolute, I would certainly sacrifice 10 seconds to run around the corner to a player vendor that had something I want.

 

Thank you for a good honest response. It shows both your want to avoid parts of Owl's Head but it also shows that the economic reality (blacksmith prices) of Owl's Head drives players to go there. I would argue that pvpers (or anyone else) congregating there was simply a byproduct of foot traffic. What I think is important to realize is that the foot traffic spawned more foot traffic. PVPers have to have someone else to kill, so they will go to a place that has more opportunities to find people that have that qualification. Merchants will go to the areas of the world that are best for trading. Social players where there are people, etc...

So why would people go to Brittany Estes (or MANY of the other player scenes)? There's not really a reason that I can see that drives player interaction. It's not even like we can expect players to "sacrifice 10 seconds to go around the corner" because other than random player vendors, there's nothing going on in these PRTs that isn't going on in another town. Just haven't a cheap well stocked vendor isn't going to recreate Owl's Head foot traffic, it's the design of the town. As much as it may pain some people to walk through the main road and see all the player vendors and goofy housing, the design pulls people into it unlike other towns that either put all that stuff in the front (resolute) or spread it out (aerie) or don't have any of it to begin with (PRTs).

Another good example of this is Kingsport. Despite being able to take the ship to Brittany on the overworld map, Kingsport still offers a path past player vendors to the center of town, and a number of "attractions" within the town (sewers) and (moon magic trainer). It makes it worth stopping by there almost every time I go from Novia to or from the Hidden Vale. The placement of the public vendor is nice too because I usually check it even when I don't have any money on me.

A few releases ago the devs showed us that heat mapping tool on the overworld map. I wonder if they have that for individual scenes. I'll bet that would show quantitatively what I'm talking about. Hopefully they can use that to track not only the paths players take in towns but also where they stop and hang out. I'll bet Resolute is like a giant red dot near the entrance and a dull grey everywhere else.

 

@RrMatey - I think you did a fantastic job creating yet another beautiful scene of Brittany. The flowing river is a wonderful touch that will breath some life into this town for sure!

The gardens are nice as well, except that one thing stuck out to me as odd...

<Constructive criticism>
You have some of those "S" shaped hedged planting beds that seem to be partially placed on top of the stone path. How are these hedges taking root on the stone path? Besides not seeming realistic to happen, I think aesthetically it would be better to keep those beds off the stone path and keep that clean looking.

Oh, and maybe a little more color for the flowers would be great too.

 

I have opinions on some of the things you mention, but I don't want to hijack this thread any more than I already have. Maybe the discussion deserves a thread of its own, I don't know.

 

Great design! I cannot wait to see the top down view of the Estates area!

 

Nice work, excellent idea!

 

I figured ocean is different from river, but do you use the same water system for rivers, lakes and pools?

Is there a reason the water in this scene looks better than other scenes that are using the "new" water? Do you know when the older scenes will be updated to use the new water and skyboxes?

 

Great posts. Seems to me a city that is more valuable to live in is the one that is near a lot of useful stuff, in fact it might need useful stuff in the town. Placing a house in a city is more valuable if the city has all the vendors in it.

So that a player who crafts can get the wax, and all the other basic additional ingredients and reagents needed to suppliment the crafting, including seeds, water etc. Rolling hills and beautiful scenery and an elite name doesn't hold as much value in a digital world as it does on earth. The place needs to have functionality and a draw for foot traffic too to increase the value of the real estate.

Also having public vendors in the town is good because it is a reason for crafters from other towns to sell suff there, and tobmake this a real estate fortune is to have people vist... Although having several public vendors can be done tastefully so that the city doesn't turn into an eyesore. Just enough so that people stop by to check on it on their way through Britney. It's close enough not to run across the world to find what we need.